Designing a vSphere Standard Switch for load balancing and failover

The load balancing and failover policies that are chosen for the infrastructure can have an impact on the overall design. Using NIC Teaming, we can group several physical network adapters attached to a vSwitch. This grouping enables load balancing between the different physical NICs and provides fault tolerance if a network card or link failure occurs.

Network adapter teaming offers a number of available load balancing and load distribution options. Load balancing is load distribution based on the number of connections, not network traffic. In most cases, load is managed only for the outgoing traffic, and balancing is based on four different policies:

• Route based on IP hash
• Route based on source MAC hash
• Route based on the originating virtual port (default)
• Using the explicit failover order

Also, we have two network failure detection options and these are:

• Link status only (default)
• Beacon probing